Childless females are voting for themselves

Can you remember an election in the last 15 years that didn't have at its core the slogan “working families”? On both sides of the political divide it has been “working families deserve a fair go”, “working families are the nation's backbone” or “we're working for working families”.

It's an old trick right out of Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes by Jacques Ellul who said if you repeat a slogan often enough, people will believe it's veracity.

Ellul’s title is out of date. The ALP needs to focus more on the many women and childless couples (there are about four million in total), because the slogan “working families” runs off their backs like water off wax.

As a former ALP Senator and now Chief Executive of Australian Development Strategies, John Black said in The Australian recently, while Rudd won the votes of many of the median income earners, there was also movement back to the Coalition on preferences from the "rich, the well educated and internationally qualified younger adults who tend to be clustered in the inner suburbs of capital cities".

Many of these were women in there 30s and 40s who voted Green first and Liberal second. That's a major change and semaphores a new constituency building.

For the last 20 years the nation has built a strong service sector economy staffed mainly by women. There is also a small but vocal group of young women who have treated the glass ceiling as a mirage and who have punched their way to the top of the corporate towers.

Increasing educational success by young women in the 1990s and more recently has produced a socio-economic cohort who are independently wealthy and politically savvy. Many of these were educated at private schools both here and abroad.

At the same time there has been a strong urban push, especially to groovy suburbs such as Newtown, Fitzroy and Norwood, by these women who also subscribe not only to post materialistic values (stop the whaling) but to further deregulation of the economy.  "For the first time since we started profiling elections in 1966, we saw what seemed to be a divergence between parents and non parents of the same age," Black said.

This was especially true of women in their 30s without kids. They did not vote as expected for Rudd's childcare policies. They voted for the Coalition. These are classic swinging voters and they voted against the trend.

Women are not only having children later but some have settled for not having children at all. As stated, others are climbing the corporate ladder and are more immediately concerned about issues such as salary, tax cuts and mortgages. Young single males (20-30) have never placed much emphasis on “working families” until they join the nappy club.

For too long spin doctors and party machine men have relied on the trend in the sisterhood that budgets and electoral promises aimed at “working families” will also pull votes from women without children. Yet these women are clearly not voting emotionally but are employing rational self-interest.

Why should they vote pro-family if they have no intention of starting a family? Even if they planned to start a family in the future, do they necessarily believe that the Commonwealth Government is the best place to control who gets what?

"Someone should tell the spin doctors writing all those Labor speeches with the words 'working families' before every full stop that there are about four million people aged 15 to 44 in Australia and half of them don't have children. For the crucial 25-34 group, the figure is almost the same," Black said.

If the electoral analysis of the Australian Development Strategies is correct, then the ALP will need to do a rethink at the next election. The rise of rational self-interest in a pluralist society is nothing new. What is new is the rise of a large niche of inner urban voters who are alloyed to free market politics on one side and pro-environment on the other.

The rise of this new electoral voting block is partly due to the fall of the Australian Democrats. The Greens have garnered not only the remaining younger female vote who traditionally voted Democrat, as well as those whose social politics is left wing and whose economic politics is right wing.

Black goes on to say that if this trend continues in 2010, it could give the Greens enough primary votes to come ahead of the Liberals at the next election in some seats and could cost Rudd Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne), Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek (Sydney), Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese (Grayndler) and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson (Batman) their seats.

“These seats look safe on the pendulum but 6 per cent swings to the Greens from Labor wipes out some of Rudd’s top ministers,” Black says.

This is good and possibly confusing news for the Greens. No one could accuse them of being free market advocates. While it’s early days, this bodes well for the Greens winning a Victorian Senate seat (Fielding’s) in 2010.

It’s also a warning sign for the government that the electorate is not heterogeneous and in the inner urban areas, childless women who are sick of the baby bonus rhetoric will vote for themselves.